


words, and certain dispositions of words

by Kyros (anafabula)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Canon-Typical Pining, Character Study, Do I have to rate it T for genre and because there is a swear, Entity discourse, I do not know this either, I have no idea what else to tag it because that is the thing it is, Is it requited? We Just Don’t Know, M/M, all I know is Martin is very gay, local extrovert struggles to distinguish vast and lonely. film at 11, set shortly post-108, that’s it it’s worldbuilding and pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-29
Updated: 2018-09-29
Packaged: 2019-07-18 23:36:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16129034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anafabula/pseuds/Kyros
Summary: Jon feels good to talk to.





	words, and certain dispositions of words

**Author's Note:**

> Teawood typed it up because she’s a blessing and a catalyst 
> 
> other enablers, including but not limited to Jace, Martin, Zomb, and Teakwood, are blessings too
> 
> the title is a Burke quote because I’m just. like this.

At first Martin had assumed it was just the crush. Frightfully naïve as it seems now — it made sense, right? He doesn’t feel like this about anyone else at the Institute, and he certainly didn’t feel like it about speaking to Gertrude, either. Not—not that it’s strictly inappropriate of him specifically, it’s the wider concept of being something like hopelessly infatuated with his boss that makes every good feeling Jon brings out in him suspect.

And, admittedly, not that he’d really had much of anything to do with Gertrude, as far as a basis of comparison for any innocent sense goes. He’d wanted to impress her, the couple times it came up, of course — she wasn’t directly his boss, but she was an authority at all, and Martin Blackwood will readily admit how fair it would be to describe him as an anxiety disorder in the form of a man, the rest of his personality often feeling like a glorified rounding error — but still, he didn’t interact with her much in the first place. Despite the shared job title, her approach and Jon’s were so different that Martin finds it hard to believe, sometimes, that the two have shared a post at all.

So of course he spends a long time — months, years really, even as the knowledge of everything beyond what he thought he knew comes trickling in to throw him off balance — after noticing the fact that something is _odd_ thinking it’s just him and the stupid unprofessional crush. Of course he tries as such not to think about it; wouldn’t it count as humoring what he ought to kill to do otherwise? And what’s he going to do, go around asking his coworkers what inexplicable extraneous feelings Jon brings out in them?

Still, the fact remains: Jon _feels good_ to talk to.

Rather — to talk _at_. To answer. Because it’s not in the sense that someone might describe, say, a good listener or a pleasant conversationalist. Or an insightful one. Or someone kind. Jon is few of those things if any, and those he resembles seem like coincidence: speaking to him makes Martin feel listened to as opposed to ignored, but none of Jon’s voracious attention is _for_ him, and it drops out of the picture as soon as Martin the person takes too long in focus.

Being listened to by Jon doesn’t make him feel studied, which would imply an interest in how Martin thinks and feels, what makes him tick. It doesn’t feel like Jon is vivisecting him to find out any kind of _why_ that could endure beyond the present as carried in Martin himself. He’s known people like that, with unflinching analytic focus that could make him feel flattered, or unsettled, or near-inevitably a blend of the two; but all of them were driven in a way that did have to do with Martin as a person, even as what felt like an inherently disposable one.

It doesn’t compare to Jon at all, not when the feeling Martin got from those people was that they wanted to know from him now what he _would_ do, that they’d discard him once they’d found all they needed for the map that was their Martin model to pass for the territory. When he’s felt flayed and analyzed by people who weren’t Jon but whose focus might seem to resemble him, they were looking for his future, to suck out of him all the surprises he could have inside into certainty, like eating the marrow from his bones.

(Martin supposes that the extent to which he’s enjoyed that kind of thing before may say a lot of him, and none of it healthy. But that hardly matters now, does it?)

Jon is nothing like that, even if it’s taken time for Martin to figure out why.

Jon’s interest is all-consuming, but it never crosses into the future. He only cares about what Martin’s done after he’s done it, and never in itself for a why. Jon looks out and only backward, he feels for nothing but the past tense. If Martin feels transfixed and laid open by him it’s like if Jon were a surgeon busy stripping out a bullet from his ribcage – but without the interest that would imply in closing Martin up again after, so the analogy isn’t right at all. Like an archaeologist, maybe, for whom Martin himself is just the dust Jon brushes from the artifacts he wants, a necessary evil in that he’s held such things within him for long enough for Jon to get around to taking them for himself.

Though it doesn’t feel as dehumanizing as that implies, really. _Really_. “Dehumanizing” makes it sound like Martin was anything else to Jon first, or that his treatment could feel in any way exceptional. It puts the focus back on Martin in the whole way he’s trying to articulate it not only isn’t but never has been and never could be. How could Jon dehumanize Martin by treating him like he does all of humanity? And nor is it about insight: Jon is scintillatingly insightful, of course, when the light hits him right, but—he’s the _Archivist_. Any of that insight shed on Martin is incidental, a happy accident.

Jon certainly isn’t kind. Martin’s not sure anyone who’s known him could say otherwise and get through the sentence without laughing. Nor is he cruel; like the idea of dehumanizing, the concept of cruelty implies the possibility Jon could harbor an alternative, an opposite.

Martin thought he might be angry, early on, but that’s even further from the truth. If Jon were angry when he speaks to people, theoretically someday he might not be, and still hold a conversation. That’s how he is, for example, contemptuous: he has an alternative. (Even for Martin, sometimes.)

The closest Martin can find, when he gives up and looks at the looming introspection for real, is that Jon is impatient just by virtue of speaking. That he’s… unsatisfied. That’s why it’s so inextricable from the idea of interacting with him at all: talking to Jon while it isn’t the case is a contradiction in terms. Only if a conversation is over, by sheer definition, could Jon maybe, conceivably be seen _sated_.

All of which makes Jon sound viciously unpleasant, so of course Martin thinks it’s all him. Martin Blackwood, starved for excitement, taking his weird long-held quirks of masochism to new and embarrassing and predictable gay heights. 

The hypothesis worked just fine long after he’s not starved for excitement any longer. It faded into the background, explained, the intermittent urge to ask Tim (or Sasha, _God_ ) if telling Jon things — anything, as long as it’s happened — gave everyone some weird bright thrill too rendered irrelevant and embarrassing, long before it was just impossible.

It’s Elias, actually, who made it make sense. (Which is much more than Martin could say about basically _any_ other situation involving an unknown and Elias _fucking_ Bouchard.) Not immediately; in the heat of the moment Martin isn’t exactly in any kind of position to determine the component parts of what stabs through him hearing it all through the door.

_That’s quite nice, actually. Tingly, but sort of freeing._

Elias makes it sound _obscene_ , which doesn’t exactly make Martin more inclined to sort out his own reaction and compare the two. But it dogs him anyway, because of course it does, and then it dawns on him anyway, because of course it does: the same _of course_ of Martin listening at the door instead of doing as he's told in the first place. The _of course_ of not having to go find the others at all, really, of them coming in on their own, same as him, just slower, there when he turned to go, missing catching Martin with his ear pressed to the wood by sheer luck.

The _of course_ that feels like humiliation even when he really couldn’t reasonably have known until he did, of how when Jon _does_ talk to Martin for Martin’s sake it doesn’t feel the same hopeless and electrifying way at all. Or rather how the feeling weaves around those interactions: in, out, in, if he’s telling Jon things Jon wants to know.

It’s Beholding. It’s always Beholding.

Maybe it's always been. Maybe—maybe Martin’s more susceptible to it, him and Elias, much as comparing himself to Elias in any capacity makes Martin feel an indistinct roiling kind of sick. Maybe it's just how long he's been here. He still hasn’t exactly made that census, so he doesn’t really know.

But he knows anyway.

The crush probably made it worse, or vice versa, or both, and now they’re inextricable; the same way too much of Martin is relieved instead of repulsed, not just to know but to know what to want.

He wants more: wants to know more, so he has more to offer Jon, so he has longer he can spend under that eye before Jon—

Before the _Archivist_ is done with him again.

Which. Fine. It’s… fine. Martin’s past changing it, so it’s fine. He’s reasonably certain that it’s going to erode away his entire sense of self-preservation eventually, presuming Martin still has one at all, and. That’s fine. It’s fine.

He wonders, though, now, what Jon gets out of it. Martin gets data pulled out of him like nothing he has a metaphor for, words drawn out with the overwhelming continuity and speed of a panic attack and none of its vices in exchange for Jon’s… for _that_. (“Freeing” doesn’t feel right, but Elias is—Elias. That generally explains things.) Martin’s seen people give statements, and came out seeming barely more than dead, even discounting the times they’ve in fact died, but presumably that’s a difference of taste. What does _Jon_ get out of it?

(It’s not catharsis, it’s not absolution, it’s not being useful. The more he tries to describe it, the more he fails, the more he needs to. Beholding, he figures, bitter but the bitterness is beside the point: something Martin would be unable to describe for the record doesn’t exist, and that just can’t be tolerated. The more he needs to pin the feeling down, the more he thinks a wider base of reference could make it click, which doesn’t help at _all_.)

Reading the statements himself doesn’t help Martin at all, really. Rather the opposite, both with regards to Martin’s own wellbeing and to the understanding of Jon. Martin himself can barely stand it except that he has to, knows he’s needed; but it wrecks him, Martin doesn’t have a better way to put it. The statements are something he can’t handle, the way they give him other people in a way he can’t hold. If he had to stop in the middle of one Martin thinks—

Well, he thinks, hopefully it would just roll off of him, like rain that hasn’t broken through his coat yet. Hopefully it would be uncomfortable but nothing more. The alternative feels like—Martin can’t imagine it; it’s too much to imagine, that’s the problem. Reading statements is too depersonalizing to be overwhelming, but if Martin had enough of himself while he did it, that would be a start. It’s like the opposite of overstimulation, which doesn’t make any sense, but overstimulation narrows the focus on the self. 

Martin doesn’t get that out of statements. He gets the experience of other people’s lives, their feelings. (Their fear, basically always, because nothing else drives a person to the Magnus Institute. Not really. That's never been worth hiding in the first place.) He dissolves into their experiences. He doesn’t become them. He doesn’t become anything. He just—reads, and disappears, and then he’s out and it’s been an eternity and it’s been no time whatsoever. It hasn’t gotten easier yet, beyond learning, maybe, what to expect.

Martin’s wrung out at the end of things, of course, but even if he didn’t need time to get the energy back he’d still take days between recordings waiting for it to fade enough for Martin to convince himself he’ll be able to stand it again. So the more he does it the less he can imagine how Jon feels.

He’s seen Jon after statements, when he’s drained and exhausted beyond just normal Jon levels, but not like Martin. Jon’s only looked anything like Martin feels afterward when he goes _without_ , which Martin could've had a long and happy life without putting together, really; and he wears it differently, not Martin’s existential wilt but mounting agitation even as his energy otherwise wanes, like a man who’s starving but not hopeless.

Martin wants Jon, but Jon needs _this_.

(Which makes it even harder to stop thinking, because it lets him think about being what Jon needs, and that’s just not constructive for anybody. It’s not—appropriate. Martin shouldn’t entertain it like this.)

And Martin doesn’t want to know why, exactly, but he doesn’t understand, so it won’t leave him alone for long.

Doing statements doesn’t hollow Martin out even as it exhausts him. There’s plenty Martin left at the end of a recording. He’s not giving himself to the tapes but taking something to ferry from paper to tape that can only be given its final form without being processed through himself. It costs him because it’s too much of something he already has enough of. Martin may not be the most interesting or exceptional or useful person, for all he tries; he knows this largely without rancor. But he is a person with a mind, and a _life._ A little more of it can be interesting, of course; he’d never have come to work at the Institute if he weren’t interested in what they do, and in knowing things, in stories. He could've lied to someone else far more easily, if that hadn't been the case.

Martin likes knowing things, learning things. (He missed school. He hasn't quite stopped missing it yet. Just—) Martin likes reading: Martin likes _being_ the one reading, the one reacting to what he finds out. He doesn’t have it in him to be anything else.

He has to, though. So he nerves himself up and does it, as often has he can, in case he can be the difference tipping over into enough. Martin doesn’t know what enough would be; would he know it when he sees it? If he sees it?

But Jon needs—something. Some part of what’s too much for Martin to take in and almost too much for him to even briefly carry over between mediums. It’s not as if Jon’s not enough of a person on his own, Martin thinks, though he files further comparison than that under the crush and his attempts to ignore it. Jon’s—a lot of a person. (He’s a person Martin likes.) That's it; that's barely anything: moving on. 

He’s a person who takes in other people’s history so voraciously it’s incomprehensible. Like it’s never enough. Like it never could be enough. Martin doesn’t think Jon would know a piece of data he didn’t want, a fact truly below his notice, the concept of disinterest in a story if it bit him. It’s just people Jon shows that for, unless they have something new and knowable for Jon to consume.

It does seem like hunger, Martin supposes, insofar as it seems like anything. Not hunger like a living being for food to break down and rebuild itself with; that of raw vacuum, maybe, for equilibrium. Not changing itself or what it consumes, just taking. 

Martin doesn’t know much about space. He could, he supposes. Would it help? That’s all he wants, or all he wants to want. If it weren’t he’d have far fewer problems from the fact that he can’t un-think the realization that he’d only get what he wants from Jon if Martin _was_ giving something the Archivist wanted in return. 

Martin can’t ask Jon if he dissolves into the statements the way Martin feels himself do, but he doubts it. Jon, he thinks, can be multiple things at once, and watch himself as he does it. So Jon’s the one who wants to know, and know, and makes it knowable forever, Martin thinks, all at the same time; and that’s not something Martin can comprehend, not really, but it does seem to make sense.

He can imagine Jon’s face if Martin asked him to verify this, though.

It’s just as well. He doubts the question would come out right, anyway. Jon is hard to ask things.

Martin wonders, a little, about the inverse of the Unknowing. Because he’s not—he’s not stupid. People run to the Magnus Institute driven by fear in case the fear inside it can trump the one inside them. Martin doesn’t need Tim to babble at him about evil and all of their inevitable doom; he _knows_. It’s inevitable, he thinks, so what does Tim want Martin to do about it?

(Tim can’t handle statements at all. He refuses so passionately Martin isn't sure Tim actually knows that he couldn't if he wanted to. Martin imagines Tim would be endlessly forthcoming with his own complaints if Martin asked, much more than if Martin went fishing for kind words — feelings — about Jon as something like a person. And it’s something Martin doesn’t know, so of course he’s curious, but he’s not actually interested. It’s enough of an ordeal on Martin’s part to work himself up to the next statement as it is. He doesn’t need Tim’s dread too, and neither does _Tim,_ and maybe if Tim can’t find anyone to entertain it further he’ll finish getting over himself and something useful will actually happen.)

Martin doesn’t take civilian statements as often anymore as when he started, but he knows well enough the way knowledge can pour out of witnesses like blood. He has a hunch, even, that it’s the hemophiliacs among them who are honest, though the Institute still never processes the statements fast enough for Martin to do any kind of real follow-up on that hunch if he _wanted_ to. But it’s the closest he sees on other people to how Martin feels talking to the Archivist when Jon does want him, so Martin’s fairly sure he already knows.

He thinks about nothing, sometimes, when he thinks about this; he does now.

Not as in not thinking. Martin begrudges the now-noticeable loss of the faculty of mindlessness even less than he does his self-preservation instinct, even if he knows that for other people it’s ostensibly restful. 

Martin thinks about nothing, as in a void; as in the quiet ambient wrongness of being alone in a room, a building, the world; as in, inevitably, the fact that he’s had more contact with Peter Lukas than he’d like. 

Not that Martin doesn’t appreciate how much of a role the Lukas family plays in paying his salary, in keeping the Institute alive. But he wishes they would do it from more of a distance. Thinks a bit bitterly that they _should_ be staying far removed, not making Martin have to know they're there, if they’re so invested in—solitude, in that pure and awful isolating emptiness.

( _Is_ that all them? The ideas of those fears feel much the same, at least; and his own dread and ignorance twist down Martin’s spine, synonymous. Are there others — how many — can Martin ask Jon that, maybe, would that be worth it? He doesn't know what he'd do with the information, really, it's just that there's something about the monster-shaped people who are also the kind of thing Martin’s got a life mundanely dreading behind him already that makes it worse. As far as the rich go he might be safe assuming _anyone_ who helps pay Martin’s salary is evil, and there's only one name he knows and fears so far, but poking into that without preparation is at least the third-best way to summon Elias he can think of, so…)

Martin shakes himself, and then goes back to wondering anyway. 

Is that why they back the Institute? (Is that emptiness how Jon feels, when he stays away too long?) If the Archivist could take in all of history, if history would end, would something like the Lukases — would their god — gods? — other gods? — get everything else?

Though it’s a kind of stupid line of inquiry. Not because the premise — an end to history, an Archivist omniscient — is existentially impossible; Martin’s fuzzy knowledge of the Unknowing is enough to keep him from bothering with fully dismissing metaphor entirely. No, it’s the idea of people like the Lukases, most of all their starving loneliness, getting anything out of the deal. Martin’s analysis has to be wrong, because he’s seen if not suffered Peter’s approach to debt and benefit. And if Jon _could_ do it, get what he wants and be actually sated, if the Archivist could be finished, if he stopped—

Well, what would there be left to live with?

The tape recorder clicks on at him. It sounds a little like a gunshot, not in tone but in how it makes Martin feel, resting as he is with his head on the desk in question.

“Sh-shove off,” he groans at it.

This does nothing, of course. It doesn’t even make Martin feel better: now his recalcitrance is on the record. He doesn’t know who listens to all the tapes once they’re filed away, the ones that aren't pulled by researchers who think they know what's happening, if that’s even how it works, if listening’s what’s done; but it’s about knowing, by definition. That’s the point. And Martin doesn’t want this, but neither does he want anyone to know that. Even the others. But it helps them so that matters more.

(He could keep his reluctance secret, Martin supposes; he could fear being found out. But what would be the point?)

Martin shoves himself up. He looks around for a second, but apparently he’s not had a repeat incident of picking up a more mundane unsolicited observer.

Small mercies, he supposes.

It doesn’t feel like he’s ready again. It doesn’t feel like that at all. But Martin doesn’t really get to make that assessment once the Beholding’s made a decision, as far as he understands it; he lacks the standing or the ability to contest it, and presumably what the Beholding observes is true. Otherwise, what would be the point?

He does still levy a glare at the indifferent tape recorder, though, before picking up a statement Martin’s wholly unsurprised to find, though he doesn’t really remember pulling it out in particular.

His mouth is a little dry, but Martin knows from experience it’ll stop bothering him soon enough. He clears his throat (and wishes, selfish as it is, tiny heresy against something he didn't ask to contend with in the first place, that he could start the tape over clean, retcon away the self-absorption and the fear). 

“All right,” he says. “Fine.

“Martin Blackwood, Archival Assistant at the Magnus Institute, recording statement number 0151013, statement of… Kir Alexander… given October 13th, 2015.” 

Martin pauses. He's never seen the notes Jon presumably takes (does he, though? The thought feels somehow like a betrayal, but—does he?) to give summaries with, but someone's seen fit to leave Martin this one. More’s the pity, he thinks, then kills the thought like breathing and goes on. “Oh, uh. ‘Statement regarding his… experience with the void’, says here.”

He would do far worse than this if it were needed. It’s fine. Martin hopes Jon’s doing what he needs to, and he hopes Jon’s back soon, and he hopes.

“Statement begins.”

**Author's Note:**

> this is the first TMA fic I ever wrote (within 24 hours of starting listening: in one sitting, wrapping July 30th. it’s been a wild eight weeks y’all) and I feel like it is important everybody know that #01 was Almost 4k Of Pining
> 
> yell at me on tumblr! I’m canon-typical-violence and my fic is wheretheverminplay


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